FBI Barters With Muslim Organizations

On Friday, CNN.com ran a news item that essentially reiterated the contents of a press release issued earlier in the week by a coalition calling itself the American Muslim Taskforce.

The American Muslim Taskforce would be more accurately described as the Muslim Brotherhood since many of the ten 10 signatories — ranging from the parent organization of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) to the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) to the Muslim Students Association to the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) — have been identified in an internal Muslim Brotherhood strategy memo as “our organizations and the organizations of our friends.”

Exhibit One: The U.S. government has identified CAIR as one of the “individuals/entities who are and/or were members of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee and/or its organizations.”

The memo, which was introduced into evidence by the federal government in last year’s successful prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation on terrorism financing charges, also describes the Muslim Brotherhood’s mission in America as one of “destroying Western civilization from within.” We should, accordingly, be very wary of the pronouncements of folks like those comprising the American Muslim Taskforce.

That is especially so given the message they are delivering at the moment: If the FBI doesn’t stop monitoring mosques and treating organizations like CAIR with concern, Muslim Americans will stop “cooperating” with the Bureau.

In the words of its press release, the American Muslim Taskforce takes particular exception to the fact that last year, “The FBI began a disengagement campaign in its relations with the CAIR, the nation’s largest and most respected Muslim civil rights organization. The FBI suspended contacts with CAIR pending the resolution of unspecified ‘issues.’”

In bold type, the American Muslim Taskforce threatens: “If the FBI does not accord fair and equitable treatment to every American Muslim organization, including CAIR, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), then Muslim organizations, mosques and individuals will have no choice but to consider suspending all outreach activities with FBI offices, agents and other personnel.”

The question then arises: Just how valuable to the country are the “outreach activities” the Bureau has been receiving from CAIR and the other Muslim Brotherhood fronts mentioned in the American Muslim Taskforce press release?

A 2004 document uncovered by an informant working for the independent research project Mapping Shariah sheds light on the way CAIR operates to discourage information sharing with the FBI.

In it, Shama Farooq, who was then the director for Civil Rights for the organization’s Maryland and Virginia chapters, describes how she limited the scope of a meeting FBI agents had with a Muslim doctor. She coached the latter to withhold information from FBI agents: “I advised him specifically not to address any questions relating to violence or terrorism.”

While the CAIR official covered herself, her organization, and the doctor by emphasizing that she told him not to lie to the FBI, the message was clear: Don’t cooperate by volunteering anything.

The memorandum provides a vivid insight into “outreach,” CAIR-style. Farooq objected to the FBI’s efforts to draw out insights the doctor might have had into “what goes on in the mind of a terrorist” and about the Muslim community in general.

Information about the doctor’s wife’s contributions to the Holy Land Foundation and his several trips to Saudi Arabia were not disclosed.

The exchange recorded in this document fits the pattern of Muslim Brotherhood operations in dealing with the Bureau, Department of Homeland Security, Defense Department, and other federal agencies: It amounts to a one-way street.

Outreach is made to the feds for the purpose of legitimizing the groups involved — how can they, or their Shariah-promoting agendas, be problems if the FBI is involved with them?

Outreach is pursued only to the extent that it facilitates the penetration and suborning of government agencies that might otherwise be responsible for countering the Muslim Brotherhoods’ activities.

Thus, FBI officials and agents are invited to appear at these groups banquets, to have booths at their conferences, and to make presentations on occasional conference calls. The Muslim Brotherhood is available to indoctrinate such personnel in “sensitivity training” and to receive guided tours of sensitive facilities, such as the emergency command center at O’Hare airport.

But these interactions amount to Potemkin villages. They give the appearance of constructive “dialogue,” “outreach,” and “community relations” in ways that serve the Muslim Brotherhood’s purposes, but not the security interests of the American people or their constitutional form of government.

As Andy McCarthy, the brilliant former federal prosecutor who put the Blind Sheikh behind bars, wrote today on National Review Online: “Government officials regarded CAIR as a representative and leader of American Muslims. Our law-enforcement and national-security agencies consulted with it closely and even permitted it to indoctrinate our agents during compulsory ‘sensitivity training’ lectures.

“Doing so, they raised its profile, facilitated its radical, anti-American agenda, and dispirited our allies in the Muslim community, many of whom are in the United States precisely because they don’t want to live in the totalitarian misery the Muslim Brotherhood and its satellites would impose.”

The members of the American Muslim Taskforce have overplayed their hand. Their recent threats to end their “outreach” to the FBI should be seen for what they are — a desperate bid to induce the Obama administration to force the Bureau to resume relations with organizations it should be shunning and closely surveilling, if not actively rolling-up.

Every American who loves this country and wishes to protect it from Shariah must ensure that that does not happen.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. formerly held senior positions in the Reagan Defense Department. He is currently the president of the Center for Security Policy in Washington.